Voting With Your Feet

A FAIRLY, SURPRISINGLY LARGE NUMBER of econommists, perhaps a bit hard hearted, have signed on to the idea that pumping investment capital and/or govenment funds into depressed, abandoned, forlorn communities such as Flint, Michigan is a no win black hole, and that a better, more econommically efficient alternative is to provide funding and incentives, including job training and addordable housing, for people to relocate to more thriving communities. All well and good, maybe, but..what about the abandoned communities, and the people left behind, which, unsurprisingly are almost always people of color? Are we planning to leave in our turbulent economic wake a littered trail or gutted shells, lying like municipal corpses all across the formerly fruited plain? An ever widening and lengthening rust belt of hope abandoned to resignation and defeat? If so, does this cycle of economic decline, depression, and community abandonment ever come to and end, or does it ravage the country until half the nation, an American dream turned nightmare, if not more, is a rusted out, pitted out, garbage dump of blowing tumbleweeds and dust? If it ends, how so, and when, and by what plan? The problem with this approach is that it not only has distinct undertones of surrender, it smacks of the compassionless ideology of Ronald Reagan, whose "vote with your feet you're on your own" theory of employment and socio-economic survival, in its social Darwinistic tough guy approach, lacked any hint of compassion or empathy. A glimmer of hope is that within the consservative community there still exist a few voices of reason and compassion amid the morass of gangland ideology, folks like the Bushes and disgraced television journalist Bill O'reilly, who once said that he doesn't care about Ronald Reagan precisely because of Reagan's lack of compassion. Have we lost, or are we losing the ability, initiative, and self assuredness to rebuild communities where they already are, or did we ever have it in the first place? Since its inception, abandoned communities have been a prominent feature of the throw away and move on mentality of American life. Always and forever, the essential, fundamental problem with American economic health is our extreme concentration of wealth, and our evident propensity to not only accept this sickness as if it were normal and healthy, but to actually deceive ourselves into regarding it as natural and unavoidable, and, ultimately, desirable. A seminal new monograph by David Wessel: "Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Guilded Age" addresses this situation. His use of the term "nwe guilded age" refers of course to the late nineteenth century, the last time the nation's wealth was so heavily concentrated in the hands of the very few. It is far more concentrated today. The numbers speak volumes: the top one percent own at least twenty percent of the wealth, the top twenty percent own at least eighty percent; a more grotesque dstribution of wealth than in the first guilded age. The root cause of this coruption is, as always. the political system, in which the wealthy purchase political power and office for people who, when elected, proceed to enact legislation, including and particularly tax policy, skewed to favor the already wealthy, at the expense of everyone else. The "Citizen's United" decision of 2010, in whcih a conservative Supreme Court essentially legalized the purchase of political offices with ulimited unaccounted, "dark" corporate money, at the behest of their and our corporate masters, is to this day supported by the Republican party, the party of wealthy, white Christian capitalists. Corporations move their production facilites all over the country and ultimately out of the country in their eternal search for the cheapest labor, and we the American people watch it happen, obligingly. Our tax system, owned, controlled, and of use to only the wealthiest Americans, we the people allow to remain, without a whimper of protest. In a nation owned by, operated by, and for the benefit of only the wealthiest few, and in which the rest of us are effectively dulled into passive impotent existence by virtue of a corporate oligarchy which feeds us a steady supply of escape entertainment opiates, the current corrupt, morally bankrupt system can hardly be expected to improve.